IDEO’s Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple’s recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group’s campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands.

But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

Tim Brown, CEO of design firm IDEO, tells me there are. He points to an emerging field, design for behavior change, as a source of methods and tools for doing so, whether in the service of organizational change management or shifting purchasing behavior, or even broader social initiatives pursued by companies for the common good.

Part of the challenge of designing for behavior change is the age-old question of incentives. What Brown calls “the rules and regulations that motivate certain behaviors and discourage others,” such as free shipping or penalties and late fees, can be very strong motivators and can be considered design elements of a product or service.

But the story doesn’t end there. Brown offers these additional tips on nudging people into new behaviors:

Create simple, new digital tools to provide feedback. “Think of the iPhone app Lose It, which allows mobile tracking of food intake,” Brown says. “Or Google’s PowerMeter , which encourages communities to share energy-use data.” (Neither is an Ideo project.). Smartphone apps and Web-based software are inexpensive to create and deploy. Keep in mind, however, that such tools are only as good as the information they channel. With regard to Lose It, for example, Brown notes that it “will only be successful if better data is available around the health characteristics of food, such as in New York where restaurants have to post the calorie count of their meals.”

Invent for the future consumer, not the present customer. This can be hard to do, as consumer research tends to focus on buying habits today. Brown suggests that future desires might be best foreseen via playful brainstorming that’s slightly structured. Offer a design team, for example, some jumping off points to fuel their imagination, rather than simply ask “what will customers want ten years from now?” He offers a recent example from IDEO. “For our climate-change website, Livingclimatechange.com, we have created scenarios that describe the kinds of innovations that might be necessary to achieve our [current] carbon reduction goals,” Brown says. “But we’re also inviting designers to contribute additional scenarios to also focus the conversation less on what we will have to give up and more on what we will create.” Rather than asking only how to provide ways to prompt people to cut energy usage by providing tools that can help them modify existing habits — an obvious goal — IDEO is asking its team to think of radical new fuel-saving products, too.

Be patient with monitoring “success.” Mass behavior doesn’t change overnight. Sales and other metrics shouldn’t be used alone to judge immediate innovation results. Again, he offers an example from IDEO: Health Buddy, an at-home patient-monitoring system the firm created for Health Hero Network — created more than a decade ago. “Recently [when presented in a June 2009 study], the VA found a 60% drop in hospital admissions from 2003-2007. The thesis is that by asking patients about the state of their condition every day through a [device with a] very simple interface, the patient is more likely to do important things like check weight, take medication,” Brown says. “And this constant monitoring allows physicians to catch issues much earlier.” IDEO didn’t expect such dramatic results over 3 months or a year. But waiting for positive results after years of trials, the number was clearly impressive over time.

The examples Brown shared with me tend to focus on the behavior of citizens, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they can’t apply to customers and employees, too. Think of it this way: If design for behavior change can set a new course for society, why couldn’t it be good for business?

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